The NPR Politics Podcast - The 6th Democratic Debate Takeaways

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

The last Democratic presidential debate of 2019, sponsored by the PBS NewsHour and Politico, has concluded. After an hour without direct clashes, Sen. Elizabeth Warren attacked South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg over his willingness to hold fundraisers with wealthy donors. Buttigieg in turn accused Warren of hypocrisy, saying she raised money in a similar way while serving in the Senate.The candidates also differed sharply over health care, exposing the debates over pragmatism versus big ideas within the Democratic party. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, and political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Asma Khalid. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also also cover the campaign. And the time now is 11.38 p.m. on Thursday, December 19th. The sixth Democratic debate hosted by the PBS NewsHour and Politico ended a little bit ago. It is the final Democratic, it's the final debate of the decade. Wow. Well, when you put it that way, I feel like I should have realized it was more monumental in the moment. Maybe I should

have dressed up. It's hard to feel that way when there are so many more debates to come, you guys. So Scott, you are in beautiful Los Angeles where the debate was held. Should we be jealous of the weather? You know, I think the weather's great. All the people who live in Los Angeles think it's cold. I clearly disagree. It's only like early evening for me, and that's pretty great. That's the bigger benefit than the weather right now. Fair. All right, so let's kick this off the way we have kicked off basically every single debate podcast we have done in this long season. Danielle Kurtzleben, you have a list of candidates who were on the stage. Sure do. And it's fewer than past debates.

And you also have their speaking time. I do. Let's do this. All right. The candidate who talked the most by a slim, slim hair, according to our count, was Bernie Sanders at 19 minutes, 42 seconds. But this was like Olympic timing, like closeness. I was shocked. We should get it down to the hundredth of a second or something here. I know. I mean, we I mean, if someone demands a recount, we might have to do it because second, we have Amy Klobuchar with one fewer second than Sanders. 19 minutes, 41 seconds.

Followed by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden, businessman Tom Steyer, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang had the least amount of time with 10 minutes, 22 seconds. You know, it's kind of remarkable. Past debates, the speaking time has been really divergent. And in this one, these four people, and then if you add Biden in, it's pretty close. Oh, yeah. I mean, you have four candidates who all spoke within a minute of one another in terms of their length.

And to me, this was one of the strengths of having a debate where you only had seven candidates. I say only because some of the candidates probably still think that's too many. But the point was, is that you had the opportunity for viewers, for voters to actually hear a more substantive conversation. And you had an opportunity for some of them to even just meet candidates who they just don't know as much about, like, you know, Klobuchar or Andrew Yang. And I think that two times to note, one that's really telling in one way is Amy Klobuchar, who has not been registering in the polls at the level of the other top tier candidates. And yet she was able to speak almost the most and really shape the conversation at several different points.

I think she really took advantage of several hours on national television. I was surprised that Yang spoke so much less than everybody else because I feel like he was also really memorable. He obviously talked about the main themes of his campaign, but he spoke about a lot of broader issues, speaking in length about climate change, about making sure there's policies for people with disabilities, speaking about disabilities in his own family.

I thought Andrew Yang also really shone through, and it was surprising to me to see that he was way less than than everybody else on the speaking time. So let's start where the debate started, which is with impeachment. Approximately 24 hours after the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump, all of these candidates were asked about impeachment. And they gave answers with varying levels of seeming like they were interested in talking about it. Right. I mean, I'm looking at my notes, and what I have written is good answer from Klobuchar, because I do remember she gave a pretty clear and concise answer. She talked about, for example, Watergate, and she called this,

I'm paraphrasing, Watergate on a global scale. I think what she was able to do was take an analog people have in their heads for impeachment, even though Nixon was not impeached, and make it current. As we face his trial in the Senate, if the president claims that he is so innocent, then why doesn't he have all the president's men testify? Richard Nixon had his top people testify. Now, that said, I don't know how memorable it was for anybody who watched the debate at this point, because it happened right at the beginning.

And also, I mean, I don't know how much voters at the end of the day really care about impeachment compared to issues like health care, education, college, any of that. OK, so beyond impeachment, the moment that really stuck out to me was this fiery exchange that the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, had with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. And if you've been paying attention to the campaign, you know, they've been kind of telescoping this debate for a while. It's an issue about where they get their money from. And Pete Buttigieg was singled out recently for having a high dollar fundraiser at a wine cave in California. What is a wine cave? In many wineries, there are caves under the ground

where you store the casks. And yes, they're nice places for fancy parties. And he had a fundraising party there. And this really crystallized this wide debate and a philosophical difference in running for president where you have candidates like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg who do a ton of fundraisers and spend a lot of time with big donors. And you have people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who not only don't do that, but make not doing that a central theme of their candidacy.

And that all came to a head in a very feisty, intense way. Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States. Mr. Mayor, your response. You know, according to Forrest Magazine, I am literally the only person on this stage who's not a millionaire or a billionaire. So if this is important, this is the problem with issuing purity tests you cannot yourself pass. If I pledged never to be in the company of a progressive Democratic donor, I couldn't be up here. Senator, your net worth is 100 times mine.

Let's be clear, Pete Buttigieg is 37 years old. Elizabeth Warren is, what, 70. So, I mean, you've amassed a bit more money by the time you are almost twice the age of someone else. But this really gets at a thing that the candidates in this race and that, to be honest, the candidates in pretty much any presidential race do, which is try to paint these bigger pictures where they try to out-relatable each other, out-blue-collar each other. And you have Elizabeth Warren trying to paint Pete Buttigieg as the friend of big tech, the friend of corporations, the guy that went to Harvard, whereas Elizabeth Warren...

She just teaches at Harvard. This exchange for me was part of a bigger theme of the debate, which was everyone else against Pete Buttigieg. Maybe not everyone else, but a lot of people. But he definitely seemed to get on the nerves of some candidates. But there was this element of he has slid through a lot of debates without having any real contact. And in this debate, they went after him at times. There was this other moment where he was. It was another one of these like, no, I'm more Midwestern.

No, I'm more Midwestern. Where he was trying to say that he can be electable. And it was an electability argument. Sure. And then Senator Amy Klobuchar jumps in. If you want to talk about the capacity to win, try putting together a coalition to bring you back to office with 80% of the vote as a gay dude in Mike Pence's Indiana.

As the Hoosier in this room, I would like to just say, Indiana has different parts of it. South Bend is a more democratic part of the state. But I take issue with the generalizing Indiana as a whole. If you had won in Indiana, that would be one thing. You tried and you lost by 20 points. Isn't this all relatively academic, though, as long as Joe Biden is leading in this sort of moderate lane? And now you have... I mean, OK, I think there's a point and a counterpoint here. One is that Pete Buttigieg has certainly become the leading candidate, according to some polls, in some of the key early voting states, notably Iowa and New Hampshire.

That sort of credential does not fall to Joe Biden at this point. It is on Pete Buttigieg. Iowa is a very important state for both Klobuchar and Warren. That's why we see them attacking him in particular. I think the counterpoint to that, though, is that, yes, I think a lot of folks are sort of looking around at this night and being like, well, hey, Joe Biden had another great night. Nobody really attacked him significantly. And he's still a clear frontrunner, according to the national polls. I think this was also a night where it's increasingly clear that the actual voting, the actual caucusing, is getting closer and closer and closer. For so much of this race, for partially tactical reasons, because so many voters have multiple candidates they like. But I think also just the fact that these are a bunch of Democrats who all have the same goal of beating Donald Trump, who all agree on

a big chunk of things. You know, there's been like a clubby atmosphere to the cattle calls and the debates. People compliment each other, tend to get along. You could tell the body language that Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren were really getting on each other's nerves, that Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar really had big disagreements. There was an intensity to the confrontations that you haven't really seen much into this point. And I think you can expect to continue as it really gets to be a real competition and voting. There were a couple of other areas where these sort of tension points between the candidates were pulled out, not about issues so much as about who they are and what they represent. So Andrew Yang, in this historically diverse field, ended up being the only candidate of

color on the debate stage. So, of course, he got asked about it. And the question is, why am I the lone candidate of color on this stage? Fewer than 5% of Americans donate to political campaigns. You know what you need to donate to political campaigns? Disposable income. The way we fix it, the way we fix this is we take Martin Luther King's message of a guaranteed minimum income, a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month for all Americans. I guarantee if we had a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month, I Americans, I guarantee if we had a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month, I would not be the only candidate of color on this stage tonight.

He does always find a way to bring it back to his message. I wanted them to ask more of the white candidates about race. Ask them why there aren't more minorities on this stage. That really frustrated me. Well, and then there was also when one of the moderators, Tim Alberta, asked a question about President Obama had made this statement where he said that, you know, a lot of the world's problems come down to old men not getting out of the way. So, of course, the first two people that get asked the question are Bernie Sanders. Barack Obama. I think I disagree with him on this one. Maybe a little self-serving, but I do disagree.

Here is the issue. The issue is where power resides in America. And it's not white or black or male or female. We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy. He talked about, it's about who has power, but he made it all about economic power. Economics and race and gender overlap. I don't know if you can say they entirely overlap. I don't think you can. But I think if you look at a lot of different things, Bernie Sanders will often take identity politics questions or questions about representation and reframe them and talk about policies, reframing the economic system, reframing health care, working on climate justice.

He argues these are things that go beyond representation and that the policies affect people's lives. That's his argument and how he often always reframes questions like that. So we are also going to bring it back to policy. We're going to take a quick break. And when we return, the candidates were asked about some things they haven't really talked about that much before. We're wrapping up 2019 on Pop Culture Happy Hour by looking at everything we saw and heard this year and choosing just 15 favorite things. Could be a song, a moment, a movie, anything we think is the best of the best of the year. Here are picks on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. And we're back.

And Danielle, this was a big night. You were watching the debate in the newsroom, and when this moment happened, I shouted over at you, Danielle, they're talking about trade. It's what you've been waiting for. I think I responded with raised fists. It was so quick. Yes, it was only two candidates that got asked about it. But Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar were the ones who were asked about it. They were asked about the USMCA, the sort of...

US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Right. The new NAFTA. Yes, the sort of NAFTA 2.0 sort of thing. The revamped NAFTA, new and improved NAFTA, whatever you want to call it. But they were asked how they feel about it. And they had two different answers. Bernie Sanders said, I'm not supporting it. I don't like it. It doesn't say anything about climate. And also,

I don't think it will stop corporations from moving to Mexico. Amy Klobuchar said, no, I am supporting it. I like the improvements that it's made. And another thing that came up in the debate, and our podcast listeners have asked about this fairly regularly, which is like, why don't the candidates, why do the debates not cover climate change? And the answer has typically been, well, they generally agree. Well, it came up tonight. Right. And one of the smarter questions I heard was about nuclear power, because yes, the candidates all agree you need to do great big things to stop climate change. But the question is what? Well, nuclear power is one area where they actually differ. In fact, you should go to NPR.org, find our issue tracker on climate

change, see who supports and opposes nuclear power. Remind me of the candidates plugging their books. Absolutely. If only you could buy it from me. But right, there are legitimate differences between the candidates on whether this country should keep around old nuclear power plants, whether it should build new ones, and so on and so forth. To shift it back to the politics for a moment, I think that this was actually Joe Biden's probably best debate of the year. He has been really shaky at times, retreating from the conversation at times, kind of being cut off many times this year. Of course, it has shown no impact on his polling numbers. But I think throughout the night, Joe Biden was making forceful points. He was making concise points. He was making very clear arguments why he thought he should be the choice over the other candidates on the stage and talking about policy as well.

And I thought this was a moment where he went into it wanting to mix it up with Bernie Sanders and draw contrasts. Okay, real quick before we go, at the end of the debate, there was this kind of interesting question where they were asked whether they should ask for forgiveness this holiday season or give a gift. And Andrew Yang went first, and he seemed sort of like, wait, what question are you asking me? I don't think I have much to ask forgiveness for. You all can correct me on this. In terms of a gift, Elizabeth has done me the honor of starting to read my

book. I would love to give each of you a copy of my book. Way to pivot back to the message. He does give out his book a lot. And with that, that is a wrap for today. We will be back tomorrow with our weekly roundup. Until then, you probably have a lot of thoughts about the debate tonight.

You can share them with other podcast listeners in our Facebook group. You can request to join by heading over to n.pr slash politics group. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Asma Khalid. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Asma Khalid. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover the campaign. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.